PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF IRANIAN

BY RICHARD N. FRYE Harvard University

One is accustomed to speak of the of the ancient Greeks, the religion of the Hebrews, or the religion of the Iranians. One merit of the late Erwin Goodenough's work was to show the error of as• suming a unique, fixed, "normative" in the first few centuries of our era as the only Judaism then in existence. This could be paral• leled in the Iranian field, for prior to the Sasanian dynasty it would be difficult to find an organized Zoroastrian "church", hence an "ortho• dox" . On the other hand, it would be equally unwise to assume an open field of countless movements, , gnosti• cism, whatever one would like, or rather what a scholar might need to fit his particular theory. As a result of the lack of data, we find religions, , and great movements in religion, constructed on the basis of one or two passages, or even words, in our sources. One must guard against a monolithic, direct linear descent of Zoroastrianism from the time of the prophet to the present. Likewise, a scholar should hesitate to accept the other extreme of a proliferation of various re• ligions and sects about which we know very little or nothing at all. The present paper is concerned with some of the problems or pitfalls in the study of religion in ancient . The problems of the date and locality of are by no means solved, at least to everyone's satisfaction, but the concensus among scholars today is that he flourished in eastern Iran about the time of the rise of in Fars (Persis) in western Iran. Such was the opinion of some scholars almost a century ago and nothing has changed that opinion. Others still argue that the , the words of Zoroaster, must be much older than the sixth century B.C. to parallel the language of the , but we know that in some parts of a large linguistic area, a language or dialect can be more conservative, or archaic, than elsewhere, so the argument ad linguam is not particularly convincing. The absence of relevant data prevents us from further delineating the history of Zoroaster, for the is no more a book 584 RICHARD N. FRYE

of history than are the Psalms in Hebrew.1) It would be the height of folly, in my opinion, to seek Gnostic elements, a mystery religion, or the like, in the Avesta. Perhaps an overall glance at the question of how the West learned about Zoroastrianism might help at least to clarify the difficulties a scholar in the Iranian field faces. For the history of Zoroastrianism one may use the figure of an artichoke, which must be peeled layer by layer to reach the heart of the vegetable. The in Bombay are the most important group of living Zoroastrians, and they were the first source of information for European scholars. But the first leaf of the artichoke was the contact of the Parsis with European ideas which shaped the interpretation of their own religion, consciously or unconsciously. Then a second layer had to be removed, the six hundred odd years in which the Parsis had lived in an Indian milieu. Some may protest that neither the European connections of the Parsis nor their living in India influenced their religion or their interpretation of it. To measure such influences would be very difficult, but to absolutely deny their existence would be unwise. The next layer to remove is the period when Iran was under Muslim domination, over four hundred years before followers of Zoroaster left Iran for India. Then we arrive at the Sasanian era which is the only one where our sources even approach adequacy. But even here influ• ences from , and from the Roman, followed by the Byzantine, empire cannot be ignored. In the Parthian and Seleucid periods of history Hellenistic influences on the were massive, not to mention Buddhist and Central Asian contacts. Finally, in Achaemenid times the impact of the ancient Near East, with age-old traditions of Assyria and Babylonia, was sufficient to influence the rapid development of a highly inflected Old Persian language to a Middle Persian stage where grammatical categories had been simplified almost to the stage of New Persian, just to mention one minor aspect of change. In short, to recover the religion of Zoroaster as it existed shortly after the death of the prophet is an almost impossible task beset with many difficulties and pitfalls. On the other hand, the Sasanian state church did develop from a pre-Sasanian Zoroastrianism which traced its origin back to the prophet. There was a continuity, however twisted and wandering, otherwise there would

1) For a survey of work in Avestan see J. Duchesne-Guillemin, "L'etude de l'iranien ancien au XXeme siecle," Kratylas, 7 (1962) 1-45, and B. Schlerath, "Die Gathas des Zarathustra," OLZ, 57 (1962) 565-590.